comScore Finds iOS Ownership Double the Size of Android in Europe

That’s when accounting for mobile phones, tablets, and other connected media devices – that’s the whole barrel! It seems that comScore has released a study which includes results from the EU5 (aka UK Germany, France, Spain, and Italy) which included media tablet owners* and based on data from their own comScore MobiLens service. This report suggests that Apple’s iOS platform (on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch,) has a combined platform reach of 28.9 users in the five European markets in the EU5 – this number outperforming Android by 116 percent.

*It’s a little bit unclear as to what comScore means by “media tablet owners” in that what I would think of when I hear the term is an iPad, a XOOM, a G-Slate, etc. What they might mean is every device that runs Android or iOS or WP7, and the rest. If this is indeed just tablets, this test will certainly be skewed toward the iPad and therefor Apple. If tablets here mean all mobile devices, then the test is still fair.

What comScore has found is that of the 28.9 users of Apple’s iOS platform in the EU5, 16.1 million of them use the iPhone. Comparatively, there’s a total of 13.4 million combined Android OS installed base, says comScore, this including both tablets and what they’re calling “connected media devices” aka tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

They go on to note that their research suggests that owners of iPads are not only Apple’s loyal customers. They mention that although the iPhone is still “well represented” in the iPad users primary mobile device category, other phones also have a “substantial percentage” of this market. The following chart shows the different major manufacturers of phones on the left, then the percentage of users who use them in the study in the next column. In the column after that, the people who own each smartphone are asked whether or not they own an iPad.

Therefor what you’re seeing below is that of all the people polled in this study, 41.7% of them said they used Nokia, while 26.4% of those Nokia smartphone owners also answered that they owned an iPad.

comScore says that this chart “This data clearly illustrates that the Apple ecosystem extends far beyond the iPhone, but it also shows that there is significant penetration of iPad users amongst owners of other handset manufacturer’s devices,” this discovery noted by Jeremy Copp, comScore vice president of mobile in Europe. He also notes that the low numbers of people owning iPads in the RIM (BlackBerry) category may well be because they’re waiting for the BlackBerry PlayBook – brand loyalty?

The next findings show the age of all the people in the study as well as what gender they might be. Total number of females is larger by about 2 percentage points, but smartphone ownership is 15% higher in males, and iPad ownership is also around 24% higher for males. Furthermore, they note that the average age for a smartphone owner is right between 25-44 (imagine that!) and essentially the same for iPad – moved only by a few percentage points.